TongyiBot user agent
Operated by Alibaba
TongyiBot is an Alibaba fetcher reported as reading web pages for the Tongyi Qianwen assistant.
The TongyiBot bot at a glance
- TongyiBot is operated by Alibaba and fetches a page when a person asks an AI assistant about it or shares its link.
- The robots.txt token for TongyiBot is TongyiBot.
- Blocking an AI assistant fetcher has no effect on search rankings.
- TongyiBot robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is TongyiBot?
TongyiBot fetches content used in answers generated by Alibaba’s Qwen-based assistant.
Alibaba has not published a crawler page for this name.
Should you block TongyiBot?
Blocking TongyiBot is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI assistant fetcher has no effect on search rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking stops the assistant from reading your page when a user asks about it or pastes your link, so its answer falls back to other sources. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow TongyiBot
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token TongyiBot is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop TongyiBot, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block TongyiBot
User-agent: TongyiBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow TongyiBot
User-agent: TongyiBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep TongyiBot out of private areas only
User-agent: TongyiBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to TongyiBot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(TongyiBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to TongyiBot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (TongyiBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "TongyiBot")How to verify real TongyiBot traffic
Alibaba publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for TongyiBot, so the user agent cannot be verified. Anyone can send the same string. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
How to find TongyiBot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts TongyiBot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "TongyiBot" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
TongyiBot FAQ
TongyiBot uses the robots.txt token "TongyiBot". Alibaba does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Alibaba has not documented how TongyiBot treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking an AI assistant fetcher has no effect on search rankings. Blocking stops the assistant from reading your page when a user asks about it or pastes your link, so its answer falls back to other sources.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: TongyiBot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Alibaba publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for TongyiBot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "TongyiBot", for example with: grep -i "TongyiBot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Public bot registry. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
